Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

My 2015 Commencement Address

By Alan
Caruba

All manner of people are giving commencement speeches to students graduating from colleges and universities these days. It is doubtful that any will be remembered because the prospects of students depend in large part on the economy into which they are entering, the majors they pursued, their individual ambitions, and capacity for hard work. Then, too, there’s dumb luck which often plays a role.

For those
graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be
much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of
330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in
the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking. Even in
the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs
have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in
1979.

U.S.
economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent.
So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or
engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon.Those of you who majored in social work,
theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation,
are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.

Of the
previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just
14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time
to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact,
you even know the history of the nation.

You are at
a further disadvantage because the curriculums of the government schools you
attended have been so distorted that you have been led to believe that the
Founding Fathers were all slave-owning, white elitists when in fact, many
opposed slavery, the labor source of their era, and would have abolished it.
However they knew they could not get the Constitution ratified by the southern
states if they did. It’s called compromising for a greater goal, the finest and
currently the oldest functioning Constitution on Earth.

Depending
on your race and sex, you have already been taught to blame anything that goes
wrong in your life on whether you are white, black or Hispanic, male or female.
If you want to know what’s wrong, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing wrong or not doing
right—dressing, manners, behavior, addictions, et cetera.

If you
have been raised to believe in God and have spiritual values, you are likely to
be mocked, though not necessarily to your face. While still the majority faith
in America, Christianity is under attack from many directions, not the least of
whom are homosexuals that constitute less than 2% of the population. Their
attack on traditional (and biological) male-female marriage that has been part
of every civilization going back five thousand years and more will degrade
society in many ways.

For many
of you, graduation means years of paying off huge loans for the privilege of
picking up a degree that, as noted—short of science, math and engineering—will
not yield a lot of income. This will impact your lifestyle including possibly
having to move back in with your parents. It may mean putting off marriage and
a family of your own for a while and your loans will affect being able to
secure a mortgage on a home, but everyone is having problems doing that these
days.

So, if all
this looks and sound bleak, it is because it is. A real commencement speech
should tell you the truth but most of them do not. They are generally filled
with inspiring talk about the future.

The future
you are looking at along with everyone else is fraught with danger. That,
however, can be said of every “future” that every American has faced since the
nation was established. It took a shooting war with Great Britain just to have
a nation and Americans have been engaged in wars large and small ever since.

The threat
of Communism faced Americans after World War Two and generations previous to
yours waited out and opposed the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years before it
collapsed. Communism is still around however in China, nearby Cuba, Venezuela
and other nations who suppress their people in the name of the utopian society
they claim to have.

The more
recent threat is the rise of Islamism, radical Islam as practiced and supported
by a significant percentage of the world’s one billion-plus Muslims. It is a
cult about Mohammed based on the total domination of the world. Divided between
two sects, Sunnis and Shiites, when they are not killing each other, they are
killing “infidels”, anyone who is not a Muslim.

It will
fall to you and your fellow graduates to fix the nation’s problems and right
now its biggest one is that the federal government is too large and we are
collectively facing an $18 trillion debt that must be resolved because just
paying interest on it makes doing anything else difficult at best.

All of the
states are in debt as well as they struggle to pay the health benefits and
pensions of civil service workers, active and retired. That often doesn’t leave
much money for fixing potholes and other infrastructure needs.

Whatever
problems you will encounter, keep in mind previous generations often
encountered much worse, such as those in the 1930s during the Great Depression
and in the 1940s who fought World War II, and those from the 1950s and 1970s
who were called on to fight the Korean War and the war in Vietnam; more
recently those who fought the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Respect their
sacrifices and their courage.

If you
want to see the government grow even larger along with the debt, vote for
Hillary Clinton. She’s still mentally and ideologically stuck in the 1990s,
plus she has engaged in behavior that would get anyone else put in jail. You
have a large choice among Republican candidates and eventually it will narrow
to someone capable of tackling the future.

The President sets spending policy. You may have noticed that Obama added $6 trillion to our national debt. With the consent of Congress. Until Obama is gone that is not likely to be corrected and reduced. Hillary would be a repeat of Obama's policies.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.